About Virtual Lands

Here are a few details about me and about this website.

About the author: Olivier Ffrench

I am a freelance internet consultant in his forties and living near Paris, France. I started being interested in 3d graphics in 1996 when I stumbled upon a nice program with a superb box: Bryce 2.1 for PC. As I was a bachelor then, I spent most of my evenings on my computer, tweaking away scenes and watching the thin grey line crawl across my screen. I soon added Amapi, Poser and a series of other 3d apps to my toolset and produced most of the images you now see in the gallery.

In 1998 I met a girl that was to become my wife and she made the big mistake of letting me use her SLR camera. I was hooked and my interest slowly switched from 3d towards photography - first analog, then digital.

A few thousands of photographs later, I have come back to my old hobby, focusing on images that cannot be done with photography and found that my two passions were in fact complementary.

Sources of inspiration

As you will see in the gallery, I get the ideas for my images from a variety of sources: music (mostly metal), movies and the exploration of distant planets. But most of my current ideas are from heroic fantasy authors such as Fritz Leiber, Robert Howard and Jack Vance.

I was an AD&D player in the mid 80s and was a fan of the illustrations found in the manuals and extension booklets. I am now collecting calendars and books about the illustrators that were working for TSR at the time: Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, Jeff Easley and Clyde Caldwell. I used to play in the Forgotten Realms settings.

About Virtual Lands

This website is in its fourth incarnation. The first version appeared in 1997, soon after I had started to use Bryce. Its first version contained only a gallery. The tutorials, materials and 3d models were first proposed in separate websites. Only in 2000 did I integrate them in the main website. This version was previousely at: http://o.ffrench.free.fr, but I had to change of web hosting in order to be able to use a CMS on the website where you are reading these lines right now.